Friday, 20 December 2019

Can we think about politics from Blair onwards in one chart? and what it means for Blue Labour

This is an
experiment. You can judge how successful it is. I am trying it
because with this election there has been a lot of talk about a
revival in Blue Labour to recapture the Red Wall. The Conservatives
have been playing to socially conservative voters since at least
William (‘a foreign land’) Hague. So why has the strategy
succeeded so well in 2019 when it has had at best modest success
before now?

We can represent all
this in a simple diagram that is now widely used

The precise
positions of the party leaders could be the topic of endless
discussion, but for this post I just need them to be roughly right,
and for the directions of travel to be right. Blair was fairly
liberal but moderately left wing. The Tories since Thatcher have
always been pretty right wing in economic terms, and where we have
seen movement has been mainly on how socially conservative they are.

If people are
uniformly distributed around this map, then the centre is the place
to be in a two party, FPTP system. Parties do not go there because
their ideology/principles, maintained mainly by their members, stops
them.

Blair won because in
economic terms he was closer to the economic centre ground than the
Tories. After 18 years of Tory rule voters wanted better public
services. Yet after the Thatcher revolution in the Conservative party
the Tories were stuck with taking a right wing stance, so they tried
to shift the debate on to social issues where either side was some
way from the centre. A focus on immigration was a way of doing that,
with the added advantage of being perceived to be pro-worker and
pro-public services (the lie that immigration significantly reduced
wages and put pressure on public services).

This move had some
effect, reducing Labour’s vote. Yet under good economic times (and
economic times were good under Labour for ten years) the immigration
issue was not enough to defeat Blair. Public services were getting
better. As Theresa May put it, the Tories were still known as the
nasty party. This is why Cameron tried to portray himself as a
liberal conservative. In opposition he tried to move closer to the
centre in both economic terms (accepting Labour’s levels of
government spending) and social terms.

But everything
changed after the Global Financial Crisis. Regrettably, social
conservatism has more appeal when times are bad, at least in part
because the (incorrect) real wage/public service argument gains
traction. Yet at first sight that should have been counteracted by
Osborne moving sharply right with anti-Keynesian austerity (spending
cuts in a recession). So although Cameron had tried to move nearer
the centre on social issues, in economic terms by 2010 he moved
further away.

Here is where we
have to make an important modification to this apparatus. In a
country where one party has a media that is very sympathetic to the
right, it can change how its policies are perceived. Cameron dressed
austerity in socially conservative terms (the government is like a
household). For various reasons that I and others have documented at
length, a policy that was sharply contrary to basic economic theory
was adopted by most of the media as a necessity, and the media
therefore turned it into a sign of good government.

So austerity was not
perceived by most people as a right wing shrinking of the state at
great social cost (higher unemployment and lower real wages), but as
a neutral policy signifying economic competence. Once we allow for
this it is clear that for many Cameron was now closer to the centre
is perceived economic terms, and so became the government in 2010.

Austerity was so
successful that Labour eventually concluded they would have to accept
it to some extent. Miliband not only moved nearer the centre in
economic terms by accomodating austerity, he also did so by trying to
appear more hawkish on immigration (remember the mugs). But Labour do
not have a means of influencing perceptions, so their perceived
position was their actual position. In addition Miliband was tainted
with the perceived incompetence of the Labour government and was not
closer to the centre compared to Cameron’s perceived position, so
he lost.

Ed Miliband’s
defeat in 2015 was narrow but hard for Labour to take. Most of the
political commentators (as they always do) said Labour should move to
the right, and after the 2015 defeat they began to before the
leadership elections. Recall that parties find it hard to move to the
centre because their members will not allow it. That post 2015
rightward drift and the apparent acceptance of austerity was too much
for the membership, and they voted for Corbyn.

There are more than
two parties in the UK. So far we have been able to do the analysis
without mentioning them but now they become crucial. Cameron by
becoming more socially liberal allowed UKIP to gain votes. His
response was to offer a referendum on the EU. Brexit, particularly a
hard Brexit, should be an easy fail according to this diagram. It is
socially conservative and right wing: trade restrictions are created
so that labour and environmental regulations can be scrapped and not
to preserve workers jobs. Its true position is close to Johnson’s
in this diagram, while staying in the EU is a pretty centrist idea.

Brexit shows more
than anything how we have to think about perceptions. What made
Brexit a narrow winner when its true position suggested an easy loss?
In short a brilliant if totally dishonest campaign that painted it as
something it is not. Project Fear, with the help of the media,
completely nullified the right wing economic dimension of Brexit, and
turned it into a plus by talking about more money for the NHS.
Staying in the EU was successfully painted as ultra liberal (letting
the whole of Turkey come to the UK). As with austerity, the perceived
position of parties and policies is what matters when it comes to
winning elections and a referendum.

Now you could say
that by allowing perceptions I can put party’s positions wherever I
need to get the result I need. But just as we have good empirical
evidence that austerity was perceived as economically neutral by much
of the population, we also have good evidence that those who voted
for Brexit thought it would have no negative impact on the economy or
their personal incomes.

That Corbyn came
close to defeating May was not a surprise if you look at his position
on this diagram, once we recognise that what Corbyn managed to do in
2017 was neutralise Brexit as an issue. Because he remained as close
to the centre as May, he gained votes once his policies became clear
as a result of his manifesto. Without his portrayal in the right wing
press he might have won.

So what changed by
2019? He was not able to neutralise Brexit, because parliament had
agreed a deal. He had to choose, and whatever choice he made would
lose votes. For that (not
good) reason he delayed choosing, which allowed the resurgence of
the Liberal Democrats (and Greens) who portrayed themselves as the
true Remain party.

Yet Corbyn is still
closer to the centre than Johnson. He lost badly partly because
Brexit is perceived as neutral in economic terms by many, so
Johnson’s perceived economic position has become synonymous with
Brexit. However crucially he also lost because the UK is not a two
party system. The Liberal Democrats, the SNP and the Greens are all
perceived to be in liberal/left space, and together with Labour they
won more votes than Johnson and the Brexit party put together.

The lesson of all
this is twofold. First, this two-dimensional diagram can explain a
lot, once you replace the parties’ actual position against their
perceived position generated with a right wing media. Of course it
leaves out a lot (the popularity of leaders, which is related to
their charisma,
the effectiveness of campaigns etc), but it seems like a good place
to start. Second, as long as the Conservative party has the monopoly
of the right wing/socially conservative vote, left social liberals
cannot afford to split their vote among several parties. If Labour
ever made a significant move in a socially conservative position, as
Blue Labour wants, it would be defeated by yet more votes going to
the other left/liberal parties.
Postscript. For an excellent discussion of some of the points made here, see this post by Marios Richards

It seems to me that a way has to be found to change our First Past The Post system. Obviously any Party that has won a majority under this sytem will be reluctant to consider change. But could Labour come to recognise that it might well be in their long-term interests to legislate for change, should they again be in power, despite the short or medium term drawbacks?

I think it is necessary to have three axes of political opinion as used at the Electoral Calculus website. It is the global-national axis of opinion that explains the 2019 election more than the economic left-right or social liberal-conservative axes included in your chart. Consider Barnsley where 40% of the Labour voters deserted the party after Labour adopted a second referendum policy in 2019. Compare that to Warwick and Leamington where a narrow Labour majority was held. Voters in central Barnsley are at the extreme end of the scale of economic-left wing opinion and have an opinion on the social-liberal/conservative axis that is similar to the national average. But they are at the extreme national end of the national/global opinion axis. By contrast, in Leamington, people are at the other extreme global end of that national/global opinion axis though more economically rightwing than the national average.

I did a lot of canvassing as a Labour Party activist and the sense of betrayal expressed by many Labour Leave voters after Labour's shift to a Remain/Second-Referendum stance came as a shock to me. I guess that the underlying motivation behind many peoples' positioning on the national/global axis may explain why Labour Leave voters were so outraged by back-pedalling over the 2016 EU referendum result. EU policies are harder for voters to vote down because they evolve from a variety of influences and institutions spread across disparate nations. Those who take a globalist position tend to be the more highly educated, who's interests and opinions mesh with those of the highly educated people who form EU policy. Such voters actually feel reassured that policies that emerge from the mists of the EU policy making process are protected from ignorant UK voters. By contrast voters who are always sidelined and never listened to, rely totally on having policy makers acutely accountable to the ballot box. That perhaps is both why many less educated and influential people voted Leave and then why they were so outraged when their Leave vote was being overridden.

I think many of the Remainers who characterise Leave voters as being bigots need to reflect on how many of the new Tory MPs in the former Labour strongholds are openly gay and Imran Ahmad-Khan the new Tory MP for Wakefield is muslim.

I have long though that it was ridiculous to think of politics in a one dimensional, left right spectrum. Rumoured I understand to date back to the French revolution. Making it two dimensions with economic and social attitudes as the axes is just a start, and exposes the existence of social and economic conservatism at both ends of the spectrum. But where for example do attitudes to the environment and climate change fit in? You find 'negative' attitudes at both ends of the usual left-right spectrum. The challenges on environment and sustainability have tended to come from outside the usual two party system, from Greens and LibDems. There are other dimensions one might add in.A consequence is the conflicting opinions that we find bundled into each of the two main parties, that are incapable of reflecting those different dimensions. Or worse, are hijacked by their own extremes, focused on one particular dimension.FPTP is a factor in that it only allows room for two major parties, rather than multiple parties that might reflect a a wider range of dimensions. The Left-Right dimension is also perhaps predominantly about Labour vs Capital but since surely today's world is about much more than that?

Unfortunately because of spam with embedded links (which then flag up warnings about the whole site on some browsers), I have to personally moderate all comments. As a result, your comment may not appear for some time. In addition, I cannot publish comments with links to websites because it takes too much time to check whether these sites are legitimate.